Today’s a mighty cool example of bizzare language design, called GammaPlex In terms of language
design, it’s nothing particularly special: it’s yet another stack language
with a befunge-like graphical syntax. What’s unusual about GammaPlex is that it’s strongly focused on graphics. It’s got built in support for ascii graphics, OpenGL, and mouse input.
In the comments on my DMCA post, a reader asked me to comment on this piece of silliness. I try not to disappoint my readers, so here’s my take. It’s a pile of silliness with the distinct aroma of astrotur – silliness mixed with a bit of deliberate stupidity in order to obscure things.
The basic idea of it is: how dare we complain about the idea of copyrighting numbers! After all, everything you can do on a computer is ultimately stored in a form that can be interpreted as a great big number! So we’re always copyrighting numbers: every book, every article, every poem, every story that’s ever been copyrighted is really just a number. So why should we start complaining now unless we’re just a bunch or dirty anticorporate hippies who are complaining because we want to stick it to the movie companies?
Don’t you dare use the number 271277229129081016424883074559900780951 under any circumstances. It’s mine, mine I tell you, and if you use it, or copy it, I can have you arrested and sent to do hard time in prison. And it doesn’t matter whether you use it in decimal, like I used above, or it’s hexidecimal form, “CC16180895F94705F667F1BB6DB20997”, or any other way of encoding it. It’s my number, and you’re not allowed to use it. In fact, I don’t think I want to allow you to look at it – so I’m going to sue all of you for having read this post!
This is something that came up in some of the comments on the recent “nimbers” post, and I thought it was worth promoting to the front, and getting up under an easy-to-find title in the “basics” series.
In a lot of discussions in all different areas of math, you encounter talk about sets and classes, and you’ll find people worried about whether they’re talking about sets or classes. What’s the difference? I mentioned this once before, but it’s buried in a discussion of the concept of “meta”, which is why I thought it was worth moving it to its own top-level post: if you don’t know the difference, you’re not going to look in the body of a discussion about the concept of going meta to find the explanation!
I’ll start with just the definitions, and then I’ll dive into the discussion of why we make the distinction.
I came across a link to an excellent article that provides an example of one of my professional bugaboos: the truly awful way that we often design software in terms of how the implementer thinks of it, instead of how the user will think of it.
I thought that it would be fun to stick with the “stack-based” theme of last week’s pathological post, but this time, to pick an utterly pointlessly twisted stack based language, but one that would be appreciated by the mascot of one of my fellow ScienceBlogs. Orac, this one’s for you! 🙂 Our target these week is the language “Enema”.
So, today we’re going to play a bit more with nimbers – in particular, we’re
going to take the basic nimbers and operations over nimbers that we defined last time, and
take a look at their formal properties. This can lead to some simpler definitions, and
it can make clear some of the stranger properties that nimbers have.
An astute reader pointed me towards a monstrosity of pompous bogus math. It’s an oldie, but I hadn’t seen it before, and it was just referenced by my old buddy Sal Cordova in a thread on one of the DI blogs. It’s a “debate” posted online by Lee Spetner, in which he rehashes the typical bogus arguments against evolution. I’m going to ignore most of it; this kind of stuff has been refuted more than enough times. But in the course
of this train wreck, he pretends to be making a mathematical argument about search spaces and optimization processes. It’s a completely invalid argument – but it’s one which is constantly rehashed by creationists, and Spetner’s version of it is a perfect demonstration of exactly what’s wrong with the argument.
Before diving off into real content, the name of my little π-calculus monstrosity has been chosen. As several people recommended in the comments, I’m going to go with Pica.
So, today, we’re going to take the dive, and start looking at some interesting semantics of the language. The goal of this is still to work on Pica’s type system: I want to work towards a first draft of what a process type will look like. But to figure out what a process type should look like, we need to think about how process abstractions will be defined and used in Pica, what control structures are going to look like. So that’s what I’m going to do in this post: ramble on a bit about what processes are really going to end up looking like. Just a warning: this post is definitely on the half-baked side – it’s much more of a train-of-thought/brainstorming thing than the things I usually post.